Starlink: Battle for Atlas

If I was going to sum up Starlink in one sentence, it would be this: Starlink is No Man’s Sky but with plenty of shit to do.

You start the game with your ship crash landing on an alien planet and your captain is missing. Your mission is to recruit allies to help you in the fight against the “Legion.”

You do this through doing missins and exploring planets. There is a lot of shooting and killing things, both on the planets and in space, and this is made more interesting on you being able to switch out guns on the fly, but more on that later. As well as shooting shit, there is plenty of other stuff to do on each planet. Activities include mining for resources, harvesting fauna, exploring, scanning animals, all with the goal of helping you recruit help and leveling up your character. Some areas will feature enemies much stronger than you are currently, and as such you will have to return when you’re stronger.

The interesting thing about Starlink is that it was pretty much promoted as needing these cool clip on spaceships to play the game, but as I discovered – mainly because I was sent a download code for review and had to wait for the toys to arrive, that you can in fact play the game sans toys. This only heightens the No Man’s Sky feel of the game, as one of the games strengths is that the clip on spaceships wither there on the fly swappable weapons, are so damned cool.

Having this plastic spaceship attached to your controller is seriously cool, and the weight isn’t too bad. Let me just re-enforce this. Whilst on the surface the clip on toys looks and sounds like a gimmick, and in reality pretty much are, they are also seriously cool and really do add an extra dimension to the game.

I can’t really explain it other than it must have bought my inner child out of me, cause I was having a blast.

And it’s a good thing that my inner child was happy, as it does feel like Ubisoft have gone out of their way to play it safe and keep Starlink a decidedly family friendly title. Not that this is a bad thing, God knows we could do with something to ignite the interest and imagination of young boys and girls and drag them away from Fortnite.